Gardening

[Stanley]

No signs of failure yet Ian, as I say a thick crop of two leaved seedlings.



I may be wrong of course but this looks like a good take to me. Now we need warm, damp growy weather!

[MickBrett]

There's a really simple way of finding out something is a flower or a weed.

1. Hold the plant stem firmly between your thumb and first finger.
2. Pull upwards.




If it comes out of the ground it was a flower...

[Stanley]

It's all right you laughing! I have £50 for the tilling and seed invested in the North Pasture!

[Stanley]

The wildflower meadow is coming on!

[Tizer]

Is any of it flowering - all I can see is green in the photo.

[Stanley]

Give it a chance Peter, it has a lot of growing to do yet. I expect it to grow higher than the railings before flowering.

[Stanley]

The front garden is growing well and flowering but the flowers that are out at the moment are very small. What grabbed me though yesterday was the amount of insect activity in the garden. I think we have at least one class of satisfied customers!

[Cathy]

Have you fed them Stanley, given them a bit of love? Hopefully some more sun will do the trick.

[Stanley]

No Cathy, no feed, as that isn't recommended for these seed mixtures. In fact the best soil to use is old graveyard soil as it has never been cultivated or fed. At the moment I suspect that the batch of seed I got had more of one plant than anything else, the tiny purple flowers. But the insects seem to like them! Plenty of afternoon sun for them in the next seven days.....

[Cathy]

[Tizer]

Can you show us a close up photo of the flowers? Mrs Tiz might be able to identify them for you.
Cathy the reason the that wild meadow flowering plants do better without extra nutrients is that they have evolved to compete under poor conditions when they can out do the big butch competitors.

[Stanley]

Will this do?

[Tizer]

Yes. Mrs Tiz immediately said willow herb but when I showed her your photo of the garden itself she realised it wasn't the normal greater willowherb which we all know as Rosebay Willowherb or fireweed that grew on the old bomb sites after WW2. There are smaller species in the family and she tracked it down to this which looks close to what you have - chickweed willowherb, Epilobium alsinifolium...




By Johann Georg Sturm (Painter: Jacob Sturm) - Figure from Deutschlands Flora in Abbildungen at http://www.biolib.de, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=726453

[PanBiker]

Sally just managed to catch the weed assassin bloke who was on our back street the other day. Anything that is green seems to be fair game. They should send them on a weed and wild flower identification course. She stopped him nuking the wind or bird seeded Ivy leaved toad flax that has established itself at the bottom of the outside of our back yard wall! Bees love it and if push comes to shove you could shove it in a butty as a watercress substitute.

[Stanley]

Thanks Janet! Whatever it is it's thriving and I think there are more to come behind it.
Well done Sally! I'm sure we could manage without a lot of the spraying the Council does. A weed is only a herb in the wrong place.....
I see it's a perennial so that's good.....

[Tripps]

Never looks like the picture on the seed packet does it? I think if you asked for a wild flower meadowyou've been 'seen off'.

I'd be starting again, and sourcing the seeds myself.

[plaques]

Rosebay Willowherb is bad news for most gardeners. There's a large patch of it within spitting distance of us. Each year we get a storm of seed blowing across the garden. Leave it to grow for a year and it establishes running rhizome roots which are a devil to get rid of. Poison the green leaves, remove any flowers, wait a couple of months then dig them out. I hope you have the mini variety that doesn't take over completely.

[Stanley]

I have the only garden on the row Ken, so if it was a problem there's nobody to infect. But surely the seed company wouldn't be selling a pernicious weed as a wildflower? Surely not.....

[Tizer]

If you want wild flowers you have to accept that you're selecting Nature's best spreaders so you do like Stanley has done - plant them in a place where they can get on with it! Even the garden centres and plant nurseries sell species that will take over your garden if you let them. An example is Vinca major, Greater Periwinkle. It's cousin, Lesser Periwinkle, is good for ground cover but V. major is butch and vigorous and you'll never get rid of it.

[Wendyf]

I'm surrounded by rosebay willowherb which I try to beat back every year, its flowering now and it is just as beautiful as many of the plants I'm introducing to my new flower garden. It's the only plant that wins over nettles, dock and thistles and it certainly attracts butterflies!

[Stanley]

I was warned about pernicious spreading roots when I put the mint in but as Wendy points out, I am locked in and that can't happen. The insects are loving the new garden!

[Tizer]

We too have mint growing in our garden but the insects love it. When it gets too much we just pull some up. I'm glad your plants are getting visited by butterflies, Wendy, we are seeing only a few this year probably due to poor weather conditions at a critical time last year. On our walk this morning we passed the grandad of all buddleias, it's alongside the gable end of a two-storey house and it's as high and as wide as that gable end - but there was just one cabbage white butterfly on it.

Where did you get your seed from, Stanley? Perhaps more species will appear in a couple of weeks but so far it looks like you were sold a monoculture. Or the birds ate all the other seeds!

[Stanley]

Whatever Peter. I have already decided that if it is a single species I shall just chuck some more seeds at it!

[Whyperion]

We too have mint growing in our garden but the insects love it. When it gets too much we just pull some up. I'm glad your plants are getting visited by butterflies, Wendy, we are seeing only a few this year probably due to poor weather conditions at a critical time last year. On our walk this morning we passed the grandad of all buddleias, it's alongside the gable end of a two-storey house and it's as high and as wide as that gable end - but there was just one cabbage white butterfly on it.

Where did you get your seed from, Stanley? Perhaps more species will appear in a couple of weeks but so far it looks like you were sold a monoculture. Or the birds ate all the other seeds!

The butterfiles that go for that are normally out end of July, but need nettles for larva food source and a safe place to chysalis, leaf tidying destroys too many

[Whyperion]

Rosebay Willowherb is bad news for most gardeners. There's a large patch of it within spitting distance of us. Each year we get a storm of seed blowing across the garden. Leave it to grow for a year and it establishes running rhizome roots which are a devil to get rid of. Poison the green leaves, remove any flowers, wait a couple of months then dig them out. I hope you have the mini variety that doesn't take over completely.

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